In Bangladesh, where just last month well-known blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was murdered in the street, and where attacks on journalists" have been on the rise, the latest news is that three bloggers have been detained for allegedly demeaning Islam and the Prophet Mohammed on their blogs. The three bloggers—Rasel Parvez, Mushiur Rahman Biplob, and Subrata Adhikhari Shuvo—were, according to Global Voices Advocacy, summoned yesterday to the police station, their laptops, mobile phones and other devices confiscated.

In July 2009, South Korea became the first country to introduce a graduated response or "three strikes" law. The statute allows the Minister of Culture or the Korean Copyright Commission to tell ISPs and Korean online service providers to suspend the accounts of repeated infringers and block or delete infringing content online. There is no judicial process, no court of appeal, and no opportunity to challenge the accusers.

This month, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Bruce Lehman, sometimes referred to as the architect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), spoke at a Silicon Valley conference that brought copyright experts together to discuss the impact of that law 15 years later.

At the conference, Lehman admitted the law was the product of a deliberate end-run around the democratic process. Lehman was an advocate for several hardline proposals to criminalize digitial rights management (DRM) circumvention. Unable to sell the proposals domestically, Lehman pressed the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to propose them at the UN World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) instead. Many have accused Lehman of using the treaty process to avoid Congress. What was Lehman’s response to those accusations at the event? “I would say that they're right.”